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Customer Fraud and Business Responses Let the Marketer Beware
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Kelly Tian, Bill Keep
ISBN: 1-56720-387-6
ISBN-13: 978-1-56720-387-5
272 pages
Praeger Publishers
Publication: 12/30/2001
List Price: $110.95 (UK Sterling Price: £76.95)
Availability: In Stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects:
Description: From remarkably frank and credible responses to their comprehensive research questionnaire, Tian and Keep provide a unique, wide ranging catalogue of frauds that customers perpetrate on businesses--and what marketers can do to combat it. They were able to receive and analyze more than 250 written descriptions--a 71% response rate!--of the acts that customers committed and the methods they used. Instead of merely a checklist, Tian and Keep obtained their data in the customers' own words, resulting in highly detailed and reliable insights into why customers did what they did. They find that customer fraud has emerged as a form of guerilla warfare against companies, that it is adapted to specific situations, and that underlying customers' motivation is a need to get even. Ethics has little do with it. In fact, some respondents even asserted that they had an obligation to commit fraud: they did it to retaliate against what they perceived as unethical acts that businesses committed against them. The result is a rare documentation of the specifics of fraud, how it threatens not only business but entire economies, and the actions--bold and subtle--that marketers can take in self-protective response.

Not only will corporate management, particularly in marketing, get detailed descriptions of their customers' fraud strategies and tactics, but they will also receive insights into where they are vulnerable and why. Tian and Keep show that fraud has become so socially acceptable among middle class customers that they are willing to share their tactics, strategies, and secrets with their friends. With this as their foundation, the authors give practitioners an arsenal of detection and deterrence methods. Equally important, they provide ways to implement them without alienating their other, blameless customers. They also show marketers what they can do to reestablish trust in their marketing exchanges with customers, and improve relationships in ways that will diminish (if not fully eliminate) the incidence of fraud. For management generally as well as marketers in companies of all sizes and type, Tian's and Keep's book is essential, engrossing, and useful reading.
Table of Contents:
  • Preface
    The Emergence of Customer Fraud Activity
    Let the Seller Beware
    The Social Environment that Encourages Customer Fraud
    Customer Fraud as a Form of Resistance to Modern Business
    Customer Fraud Acts
    Product Acquisition Fraud
    Product Return Fraud
    Service Acquisition Fraud
    Fraud in the Use of Sales Promotions
    Fraud in Negotiations
    Fraud Facilitated by Employees
    Summary of Managerial Insights Suggested by Customer Fraud Acts
    How Customer Fraud Acts Succeed
    Marketers' Practices that are Vulnerable to Fraud
    Customers' Fraud Methods that Prey on Marketers' Vulnerabilities
    The Sequence of Events Leading to Customer Fraud and to Repeat Fraud
    Customers' First Thoughts of Committing Fraud
    Customers' Post-Fraud Feelings, Justifications, and Discussions with Others
    Managerial Insights Suggested by the Process of Committing Customer Fraud
    Appendix: Getting Customers to Disclose Fraud Stories
    References
About the Author: KELLY TIAN is Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Kentucky, where she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on ways to design consumer behavior research./e Formerly an insurance claims investigator trained to detect fraudulent behavior among amateurs and professionals both, she also worked for the U.S. General Accounting Office. Tian is a regular contributor to the journals of her field on a variety of topics, including consumer nonconformity and resistance.

BILL KEEP is Associate Professor of Marketing at Quinnipiac University./e His teaching and research center on retailing, channel partnerships, and related legal issues, with a special focus on pyramid schemes, consumer fraud, and the Robinson-Patman Act. Among his various private and public consulting clients are the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission, and legal prosecutors in Kentucky and Florida.
LCC Class: 658
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